Floods Also A Disaster To The Mind

Along with the destruction that rising rivers and heavy rains have wreaked on central U.S. homes, businesses and farmland, the flooding has taken a devastating toll on Midwesterners' psyches.

In their rush to fill sandbags and protect their property, many physically exhausted flood victims do not realize how mentally exhausted they are, mental health experts say.

And many won't fully come to grips with their losses until the floodwaters recede and they see the damage to their homes, belongings and crops.

In preparation for what is expected to be an onslaught of demand for mental health services in coming weeks, Illinois officials have arranged for a hot line that has served economically strapped farmers to take calls from flood victims.

The hot line will take calls from residents in the 24 Illinois counties that have been declared federal disaster areas. In the Chicago area, the counties include Lake and McHenry, where torrential rains this spring and summer led to a presidential disaster declaration last week.

The 7-year-old farmers group, the Farm Resource Center, is installing additional toll-free phone lines at its offices in Downstate Mound City. The nonprofit group also is mobilizing its more than 600 volunteers and hundreds more workers in community mental-health agencies in the affected counties.

"Right now, people are still in what we call a survival mode," said Roger Hannan, executive director of the Farm Resource Center. "They're still hopeful. They're still not giving up. Mostly, what they seem to need right at the moment is what we refer to as the `Now, now, there, there, it's OK' type of contact. It doesn't take a paid clinician to do that.' "

But in coming weeks, when the enormity of the flood damage hits home, many victims will need more than a pat on the back.

"What people need to realize is these losses are very similar to the death of a close family member," Hannan said.

Michael Rein, executive director of the Adams County Mental Health Center in Downstate Quincy, which has experienced some of the worst Mississippi River flooding in recent days, agreed that the disaster's mental health impact is still largely hidden.

But in several weeks, he said, "we'll begin looking at the crises-the anxiety, the stress, the spouse abuse, the child abuse, the drug and alcohol abuse.

"We've got to get staff trained now and get them located near the people. We can't expect that they're going to take the time to come into our offices. We have to take the staff to them."

Rein said his agency is setting up satellite offices, making plans to put "mobile therapists" on the road and establishing its own 'round-the-clock, hot line.

In addition, the Adams County agency is lining up the services of psychiatrists and nurses along with extra supplies of stress-relieving drugs and other medications that psychiatrists might need to prescribe.

Jess McDonald, director of the state Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, which partly finances the Farm Resource Center and the community agencies, said the groups mostly came to the state proposing ways to deal with the expected demand for flood-related counseling.

"They prodded us," McDonald said of the Farm Resource Center. "We would not have been able to have marshaled any kind of a response without having something like this program."

McDonald said many of the flood victims in rural and far-flung suburban areas "are highly self-reliant individuals. These are folks who are not as close to the social service and human service system. This kind of program makes it a little easier for these people (to receive counseling) in their communities."

LilliAnn Dittmer, an outreach counselor for the Farm Resource Center, has been one of the first counselors in the field. The Quincy woman spent Monday, as she has the last several days, sitting behind a table in the lunchroom of Baldwin School in Quincy, along with officials of local, state and federal disaster relief agencies.

Dittmer said many flood victims have passed by her table as they have picked up insurance claim forms, disaster-assistance applications and other paperwork.

"Some of them are hesitant," she said. "Some are saying, `I don't need to worry about my stress. Others have it a lot worse than I do.' But in fact they've lost all of their homes, farmland and all means of support and employment. They may not be back in their fields for over a year, and yet they are still saying, `Other people have it worse than I do.' "

But Dittmer said some flood victims already have reported conditions similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, such as that suffered by soldiers returning from war.

"People are saying they are waking up in the middle of the night with water coming to get them and their house," Dittmer said. "That's because of the stress they have been dealing with for 20 hours a day. Once the adrenaline high works down, that is when they start having nightmares."

Dittmer, who used to live on a farm, says she begins counseling flood victims by recalling the anxiety she felt every day in the summer of 1983 when a drought withered her corn. Once they understand she has suffered a similar loss, they are more likely to open up, she said.

Others, however, aren't ready to talk. And Dittmer tells them that is fine too.

"I'm telling them, `Get your paperwork done, and then I'll call you in two or three weeks and we'll see where your head is at,' " Dittmer said.